


Watch the Dust Settle

by weirandcairn



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sign Language, Slow Burn, ambiguous Max/Furiosa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-04-22 12:57:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4836251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weirandcairn/pseuds/weirandcairn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max leaves, and Max comes back. Like a Polecat, she thinks, or a barometer bird from the Before Times. It’s the Citadel and everything else that keeps changing around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

>   
>  _“You do not have to be good._  
>  _You do not have to walk on your knees_  
>  _for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting._
> 
> _Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.  
>  Meanwhile the world goes on."_  
>  -Mary Oliver

Afterwards, she remembers the details of the ride home only softly, vaguely, like trying to make out the details of something in a sandstorm. She remembers hands on her neck lifting her head up, impossibly gentle. She remembers stabbing burning pain and a rattling moaning sound, realizing it was coming from her, a voice apologizing, the muffled whoosh of blood in her ears, the press of bodies around her on the floor of the cab, slipping in and out of blackness while her head rested on someone’s shoulder. She remembers the jolt as the car stopped, jerking her back to consciousness, remembers strong arms lifting her down out of the car, supporting her weight as they stand at the gates of the Citadel, remembers looking down from the rising platform and finding a familiar upturned face in the crowd staring back at her.

It isn't until the fourth day, after empty blackness and another transfusion and drifting in and out of sleep, that Capable sits on the edge of the bed after changing the bandages wrapped around Furiosa's torso and asks, "Do you think he'll come back? Max?" Then in a rush Furiosa remembers him. She remembers his voice, solemn and quiet like a prayer, like a secret, telling her his name.

“Max…” she says, wonderingly. “His name is Max.” Her voice is rough from disuse and the right side of her face aches; her mouth doesn’t want to move normally. The extra movement needed to speak causes another stab of pain to shoot through her chest. "I don't know," she says. "He might."

She doesn’t remember him leaving, but she isn’t surprised. Part of her had hoped that perhaps he might—but he has plenty of reason to stay away, she thinks, pushing away the rest of that thought. He had been reliable, and they had fought well together, worked well together. He was still a feral. She had watched him flinch at movements in his peripheral vision, hold himself coiled like he was constantly expecting an attack. The cramped corridors of the Citadel were probably the last place he wanted to be. He had enough ghosts of his own to carry around already.

* * *

On the sixth day, Capable starts from her vigil by Furiosa’s bedside to see a chalk-faced War Boy standing uncomfortably in the doorway. She, Cheedo, and Mara have been keeping watch over her while she slept. Mara had put a tube into the neat hole in her chest where Max had stabbed her. “Creates a vacuum so the air can’t get back in and lets the lung re-inflate,” she had explained, “Sometimes the lung collapses again though, even with the tube.” Mara had taken it out that morning after deciding that it was safe, but recommended that they keep an extra close ear on her breathing. Cheedo is dozing next to Capable, wrapped in one of the Vuvalini’s shawls. Capable puts her book down, marking her spot with the corner of Cheedo’s shawl.

“What are you doing here?” she asks softly. “I’ve never seen a War Boy this high up before.”  
She had seen some of Joe’s Imperators; his closest generals, Audax and Dirus; both his sons, Rictus often coming by to beg Cheedo for a story. But never just a regular War Boy. Only the closest members of Joe’s court had been allowed up to their personal quarters.

“I…I wanted to see the Imperator,” he says, “Is she still alive? Imperator Furiosa? She’s going to be ok, right?” His voice is hesitant and hushed.

“She’s sleeping. You can come sit, if you’d like.” He comes and settles down a few feet away from Capable and Cheedo, keeping a cautious distance. “You know her… How do you know her?”

He looks at her strangely. “Everyone knows the Imperator … but I’m on her crew.” He shakes his head in annoyance, frowning. “Was. Was on her crew, before I got sick again. The Night Fevers are gonna get me this time.”

“What’s your name?” Capable asks.

“Hazard.”

Hazard is still there when Cheedo wakes up, and she startles up quickly, straightening her tunic and hair. The three of them talk in hushed voices, mostly about Furiosa, until she’s wracked by another coughing fit and wakes, groaning. “Easy, easy, it’s ok,” says Capable as Cheedo reaches for a cup of water, lifts it to Furiosa’s lips. Furiosa stares at Hazard, still hovering near the bed. With a frown and a few blinks, he comes into focus.

“Hazard!” she rasps.

“Boss. Knew you’d hang in there.” His voice is suddenly thick, choked off.

“How are you here?”

“The Pups said you were back. I needed to see. And…and I talked to the other War Boys. Joe’s dead right? So…who’s in charge now? Is it you? We’d rather it was you than Corpus. All the Pups do at least. They want to help.” All of his words come out in a nervous rush.

Cheedo is focusing intently on Hazard now. This is the most he’s said all afternoon about the other War Boys.

“How many of the other War Boys are left? And how many are behind Furiosa?”

“Nine or ten of us, not counting Corpus’s two Boys. And all the Repair Crews. They want to see you.”

Capable has never seen Cheedo like this before. She looks older, sharper than her usually reserved and quiet self. “Can we count on them?” Hazard nods his head emphatically.

Furiosa has let her eyes drift closed. “Cheedo, can you talk to them? We need them on our side.” The wounds in her chest are still stabs of pain and the effort of talking is wearing her down.

Hazard and Cheedo leave soon after Furiosa falls asleep again. Toast comes with them down to the War Boys levels. She remains cagey around the Boys; they’re on her side now, but the chalk-white still screams threat. The Boys regard her with equal parts awe and caution, this dagger-tongued former Wife with her hair chopped nearly as short as an Imperator’s. But somehow, the Pups take a liking to her immediately. Soon, Capable can see her leading a gaggle of them through the halls, ready to jump on command. With the Pups on her side, Toast scouts through the Citadel, keeping lookout on the horizon, taking stock of how many weapons they have left, listening for discontent among the remaining War Boys. They don’t have many fighters but at least they have allies.

* * *

The first time that Capable walks into the shop, the boys fall quiet and stop their work one by one, until it’s so still that she can hear the pings of an engine cooling somewhere. Furiosa and Toast follow in behind her. The neat line of black stitches that Cheedo had sewed closing the gash on Toast’s cheek stands out as clear on her skin as some of the boy’s own marks. Her hand hangs near the pistol she’s taken to carrying in her belt everywhere. Capable looks out at the wave of chalk-whitened faces.

The Blackthumb nearest to her catches sight of Furiosa as she edges into the room behind Toast. In an instant they’re all clustered around like Pups, talking over top of one another in a rush of voices.

“Boss! Furiosa! You’re really back!”

“You’re still alive! Hazard said—!”

“‘Course she is, dipstick, she’s _the Imperator_.”

“—knew you hadn’t traitored us.”

“Less shoving, can’t you see she’s hurt!?”

Finally the noise dies down and the crew steps back. They’re still staring at Furiosa like she’s a god returned to the earth. They’re waiting for her to speak but all the words have died in her throat. She has always had her actions to speak for her; words are a tool that she has let grow rusty. There’s no way to break the news to them gently. She doesn’t know how she can ask them for this, to shatter their entire world so completely.

Capable breaks the silence for her. “We’re going have to ask you to trust us. Can you do that? I know you don’t know us and there’s no reason that you should but—”

One of the younger boys interrupts, “You’re the Boss’s people ain’t you? Then what kind of question is that?”

Some of the boys standing next to the speaker nod their heads in agreement. Then one from the back of the shop calls out, “But where’s all the other War Boys?

“The Immortan’s dead and everyone else—what happened to everyone else? Are they coming back?”

Toast jumps to answer the question like she had been lying in wait for it. “Some of them will. We drove the Rig back through the mountains and blocked the pass but they’ll be back. The War Boys that are still loyal to Joe, they’ll be coming back to retake all of us.”

“You ain’t loyal to the Immortan? But…but you were his Wives!”

“Joe’s dead,” Toast spits, “and good riddance. _He was a lying old man._ I’m loyal to _me_ ; I’m loyal to my sisters. I’m loyal to Furiosa.”

“He was our redeemer! He took care of all of us!”

“Did he really? Did Joe really give you what you needed? Keep you from going thirsty? From being hungry or sick?”

“We’re half-lives—we’re always going to be sick! Nothing he can do about that!”

“Joe was as much half-life as you, mate, he just kept all the best stuff for himself,” says Capable, “He’s sitting on all this water and he hardly shares a drop with you, did he? Keep you all on water rations?”

“It’s not good for us to get too much water, we shouldn’t become addicted to it,” protests a tall boy standing to Capable’s side.

“You’ve got that engine on your chest, you think you’re that different?” asks Toast. “Engines need water to stay cool, same as you.”

“He’s going to conduct us to Valhalla! What does it matter what here’s like?”

Capable bites down her retort that Valhalla is a lie. “Joe wasn’t immortal and staying behind to conduct you to Valhalla. He was afraid to die!” Her voice softens the blow of her next words. “He didn’t care about you; he was lying. You were just battle fodder to him. The other War Boys won’t understand that yet.”

The shock and hurt is showing on all of their faces now.  
“Boss…it’s true? Joe was lying?” asks the boy that had spoken first.

Furiosa speaks for the first time. “You deserve better than the scraps Immortan gave you. You deserve a better chance.” They’re the truest words she can find. These boys are her crew; most of them have known her since they were just Pups. She was _their_ Imperator. She couldn’t trust them not to betray her plan before; she couldn’t afford that vulnerability. She betrayed them out of necessity, and it’s a guilt that weighs on her mind. She betrayed her crew on the Rig, _her Boys_ , boys that trusted her, and she had flung them to their deaths. There isn’t a way she can atone for that; it’s just another coat of blood on her hands. She can do her best by the boys left though; they deserve at least that much.

“The rest of the war party isn’t going to give up,” she continues. “It’s two weeks around the Wall of Mountains and we need to be ready when they arrive. We need to know you’re on our side.”

“Of course. But how do we know who’s on _your_ side?”

“I don’t know that,” she admits. “I’m sure Corpus’s boys aren’t. We’re going to have to rely on you. Can you do that? Help us find out?”

“Anything, Boss. We can do it.”

And somehow it’s as simple as that. They trust the former Wives because the girls are on Furiosa’s side. They trust Furiosa because she has never let them down before, because she has always been theirs in the way that the other Imperators weren’t. She was down in the warrens with them, on the vehicles with them as a War Boy long before these boys were even old enough to remember, and leading them later as an Imperator.

The boys have drifted back to work and Capable is heading out of the shop when the younger boy, the one that had spoken first approaches her. “What’s your name?” he asks.

“Capable. What’s yours?”

“Fetcher. Can I borrow your hand for a second?...Ok hold these pieces here while I screw them in, great.”

Somehow Capable gains their trust in her own right, on top of Furiosa’s endorsement; after seeing her with Fetcher, the rest Boys warm to her nearly as quick as Nux had. They are nothing like what she had expected. She had thought that Nux had been an anomaly somehow, but the rest of the boys are just as eager to help, just as friendly. They move around one another in the close quarters of the shop like they are all part of the same creature, as in sync as a pair of dancers’ feet.

She finds that she’s good at it, at fixing things. Gasket hovers over her shoulder like she’s a Pup, pointing out different tools, how to replace parts in an engine, how to weld a straight line. It’s hard not to see Nux a little bit in all of them. Fetcher isn’t as quiet as Nux was, and underneath his white paint his skin is much darker, but the zigzagging circles and lines of an engine belt over his shoulders remind her of the engine on Nux’s chest. Gasket is a little older than Capable is, but his eyes are blue like Nux’s were. Sometimes she misses Nux so badly it hurts. She thinks he would have loved to see what they’re building here. He’d had so much hope. Maybe more than she does.

* * *

Corpus had dodged the Milking Mothers and holed himself up into his rooms as soon as they had returned to the Citadel, Toast’s Pups had reported. “He’s waiting for the rest of the war parties to come back,” she says on the seventeenth day. She’s walking next to Furiosa down the hallway to Corpus’s rooms. Her hand hovers just behind Furiosa’s back, ready to catch her if she goes down.

“He doesn’t want to challenge us without their support,” Furiosa says. “He knows there’s not enough Boys here in fighting condition to back him up.”

“Scared crook bastard won’t even leave his room,” Toast mutters. She has tried several times to get him to talk to her, had finally resorted to shouting through the door, but he rebuffed every invitation. It smarts that he still has the upper hand over her in this regard, even now. That he has retained it through stubborn cowardice is just another bitter tincture for her to swallow. Corpus has been the eyes of the Citadel for as long as she’s been here; he’s one of their best resources, if one of least pleasant. He’ll lord the every scrap of information over her if she can even get them from him at all, but she’ll bite her tongue and do it because it means another bullet in her gun. A plan is as much a weapon as the pistol she keeps strapped at her waist. She intends to use both of them.

It’s possible that Furiosa knows more about how Joe ran things, as high up as she was, but that seems like a childishly naïve hope. Besides, Furiosa, as injured as she is, is barely in a position to take care of herself right now, let alone lead them. Privately, Toast doesn’t think Furiosa would be suited for it anyhow. She would sooner bolt out to the road again, busted ribs and lungs be damned, before she agreed to anything of the sort.

Furiosa pounds on the door. “This is Imperator Furiosa! Corpus let us in.”

He sits in his chair by the wide window, looking out through his binoculars. Two War Boys stand off to the side of the room, and both of them regard the women suspiciously when they enter.

“I hear you’ve won over your crew of War Boys. It seems you may have claim on this patch of earth yet, Imperator,” he says bitterly.

“I claim nothing,” Furiosa retorts, “I will not rule here. No one person will rule here.”

Corpus scoffs.

“You have a chance still, to be useful,” says Toast, cutting in. “You know the trade agreements. You know the extent of supplies; how much water, food, and guzzoline we have.”

“Joe’s dead; even if the war party defeats us when they return, do you really think that the Prime Imperator will be so eager to keep one of Immortan Joe’s sons around?” asks Furiosa.

“It doesn’t have to be terrible—” Toast adds then pauses and decides to gamble. “You can go on just as you did before. Cut us a deal.”

“A deal?” Corpus spits. “I’m not so desperate that I’ll deal with a traitoring Imperator and some Wasteland Breeder. Keep falling through on trade agreements and soon enough you’ll all be shredded and feeding the crows, anyhow. I can wait.”

Furiosa barely contains a snarl, and starts towards his chair. Toast reaches out an arm to pull her back, and Furiosa whips around, startled, teeth bared. Corpus chuckles, nasal and humorless.

“You don’t plan to rule, but they will claim you anyway. And you’re already _so_ like the old Immortan. You’ve laid this path for yourself, remember that.” His breath wheezes over the force his next words. “ _Bag of Nails_ indeed.” He swings his chair around, signaling his end to the conversation.

Somehow, Toast corrals Furiosa out of the room and down the hallway before Furiosa’s legs give out and they have to sit. “That went well,” Toast says dryly.

* * *

 

Eighteen days after their return to the Citadel, the remains of the war party come racing around the Wall of Mountains.


	2. Chapter 2

Toast watches the remains of the Citadel party limp up from her perch in the main tower. She had been watching the horizon since the first cloud of kicked-up dust caught her eye an hour ago. She runs to find Furiosa.

 

* * *

 

When she reaches the Vault, Cheedo and Dag are already there, hands clasped tight together as Dag talks softly to Cheedo. It feels like she’s barely seen them since they’ve been back. Dag has thrown herself wholeheartedly into her seeds and spends most of her time in the gardens, coming back late after sundown with dirt caught under her nails. Cheedo has split herself between the Milking Mothers, tending to Furiosa with Mara, and spending the rest of the time with Dag in garden.

Janey and Mara are standing in the windows looking out at the cluster of cars below. Janey grasps her rifle in one hand. “So you noticed our visitors,” Dag drawls. Toast rolls her eyes but goes to sit by them anyway. “Where’s Capable?”

Capable and Fetcher skid into the Vault doorway at that moment, both of them out of breath. Gasket, Mag, and Rook come up behind them a second later. “War Boys down below!”

Shale and Echo dash in behind them, almost tripping into Rook. “Toast! Have you seen the—”

“War Party? I know.” Echo plops right down on the Vault floor to catch his breath, his tiny chest heaving.

In minutes the Vault is crowded with Repair Boys, War Boys, Pups, and a handful of the Milking Mothers.

Furiosa strides into the Vault, her forehead blackened and her prosthetic arm strapped in place for the first time in eighteen days. The older model hangs heavy on her bruised shoulder, and the weight hurts but there’s no way she’s going up against a War Party without it. “Toast, how many are we looking at?”

“Maybe 30? I can’t see perfectly through all of the windscreens, but there’s twelve cars down below. A lot of them look pretty beat up. Have you seen the other Imperators?”

“I didn’t see Dirus’ car when we reached the pass again. Maybe we got lucky and he crashed,” says Capable.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Furiosa says.

Capable, Furiosa, Janey and Mara are crouched around the window edges with their rifles. Toast has her pistol and a knife strapped to her belt; Furiosa has two pistols in hers. Citadel has just under 300 inhabitants, but most of those are made up of children and non-combatants. Of the War Boys that were left behind, Hazard, Mag, Rook, and four others are the only ones that are well enough to fight. The Repair Boys are a little better off, but none of them have shot a rifle before. They’re used to having strength on their side and fighting in close quarters, not fighting from a distance like the Vuvalini. The towers are too high up to accurately throw a lance from, and they only have fifteen of them left anyway. The last thing Furiosa wants to do is put her people in close combat with a seasoned War Party, but right now it looks like that’s the only option they have.

“Cheedo, I need you to get everyone that can’t fight inside, away from the windows,” Furiosa says, “We’ll take out as many as we can from here but they’re going to get in eventually. We don’t have enough ammo to hold them all back. “

She wishes desperately at that moment for Katie, for Ace, for Angharad, for Val, for Max. She wishes she had someone to guide her, someone who would know what to do besides leave a burning path of destruction in her wake. When she had woken up she hadn’t asked where Valkeryie was, where any of the others were. Speaking it out loud would be like having her soul torn out through her throat, the pain of it is greater than she could possibly imagine. She’s not so sure she even has a soul anymore; machines don’t have souls. Through all of her 7000 days at the Citadel it had somehow been a comfort to think that out there somewhere, Val was still alive and thriving in the Green Place. If they hadn’t turned around, if Furiosa hadn’t come back to them, they would still be alive. She brought ruin on all of them, scorched one of the few good things left in this world. Knowing that Val is really gone now leaves a gaping hole in her chest, and it feels like she’ll be sucked down into the black, viscid depths of it if she pauses. She can’t allow herself to think. She keeps moving.  

From the back of the room she hears two women speaking in hushed, urgent tones. One of the Milking Mothers and a Greenthumb, both from the Wastes to the east, with their dark heads bent low together. The Greenthumb calls out, “Wait, we think we have an idea.”

The Greenthumb’s name is Yaga and she’s as small as Toast, with bronze skin lined from the sun and a tangle of black hair tied back from her face.  She’s at least 13,000 days old but her eyes still spark as she explains her plan. “So we have a little guzzoline and powder to spare, right? So what we used to do out in the canyons is set up a line of explosives, all you have to do is ignite the first one and each sets off the next in the chain. Position ‘em right and you could take out a whole cliff if you wanted to.”

“We don’t want that,” cautions Toast.

“Can they be made so they’ve got less power? Like flamers, so they won’t take out the walls,” says Furiosa.

“I can make almost anything if you can spare the materials,” says Yaga confidently. “But we’ll need enough space to set them up.”

Yaga is as good as her word; in two hours she has an armful of charges prepared. “You were wasted up in the gardens,” Toast says admiringly.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. All that green after years of dirt? Hasn’t gotten old yet.”

They recruit Hazard and Mag to help them set up the charges. Hazard scouted out an intersection of the two biggest hallways at the base of the main tower; plenty of ventilation and corners to protect them from the blast when they set it off. Mag was more than happy to help, excited as always by the prospect of things that went boom. Yaga and the two War Boys set off to lay the trap, each of them with a full pistol just in case. They’re back in no time though, deep in conversation over old battle stories, and report that the Citadel is still locked up tight. The Vuvalini, Toast, and Furiosa keep picking off any War Boys from the walls of the tower, the few that dare to climb up.

 

* * *

They manage to hold the War Party away from the gates until nightfall, and then their rifle bullets run out. Furiosa lets out a howl of frustration when she realizes, half at herself, half at the situation. She was _sure_ she had been counting, but somehow she had drifted off and what good is she if she can’t—

Capable’s hand on her shoulder brings her back. “Furiosa are you with me? We have to go,” says Capable, and only then does she realize she’s standing completely uncovered. “Furiosa, we have to go now.” Capable pulls hard on Furiosa’s arm, dragging her off-balance and towards the doorway a second before a bullet cuts through the space where she had just been standing. Ducking, they run towards the cover of the hall away from the edge of the balcony as a spray of bullets opens up behind them.

They make it back to the Vault just as Rook stumbles in, bleeding from a bullet wound in his leg. “I’ll be fine, ’s ok,” he slurs, “They’ve got in, three levels down. Took out a few of ‘em.”

Yaga jumps up from where she had been bent helping Dag bandage a Pup. “Which hallway?” she asks Rook. 

“Right below last I was, moving up. Not in.” 

“Ok, we have to hurry. Toast, Furiosa, follow me.”

She sprints out of the room with Toast on her heels. Furiosa grits her teeth around the pain in her ribs and starts after them.

They run down the stairwells as fast as they can, only pausing at a window for Toast to take out a group of War Boys climbing up the outside walls. Furiosa runs behind her, dealing with the few War Boys that have made it this high already. She had a full magazine in her pistol when she left the Vault but she’s already taken eight shots. A War Boy heaves his shoulders through the window to her left, momentarily at a disadvantage while he uses his arms to pull himself inside. She drops him with a bullet in his forehead and makes a note. Nine shots. She’s counting now; she won’t make that mistake twice. _Six left, five, four._ Three.

Yaga peers around the corner at the intersection of two hallways, sighting the chain of rust colored boxes she had laid along the walls. The remaining group of War Boys is at the end of the hallway. Furiosa’s eyesight goes tunnel-vision around them. She has three shots left; she knows every one of them is going to land.

Furiosa senses the extra body behind her the second before she hears the gun cock. One War Boy had made it further down the hallway than the others. Dimly, she hears Toast’s warning shout, feels the bullet clip her shoulder, but she’s already spinning to retaliate. She’s just a hairs-breadth too slow; she hears the slide of the War Boy’s gun as she’s still raising hers.

With a snarl, Toast launches herself at the War Boy from behind. Her arm hooks around his neck, cutting off his airflow as she unsheathes the knife from her belt and plunges it into the space under his ribcage. As soon as her feet can reach the ground again she’s moving, dragging the War Boy to floor. She flings herself onto his chest and plunges her knife again into his neck, leaning all of her small frame into it.

“Out of the way!” shouts Yaga. Toast yanks Furiosa to the other side of the hallway, out of the line of sight of the War Boys that are already running towards them. Yaga fires into the closest box, which explodes and lights the next; in an instant the hallway is engulfed in flame. Furiosa can feel the blast of heat rush towards them and suddenly she’s on a raid again, grease and blood mixed running down into her eyes, hearing the crackle of flames and cries of pain over her own heavy breaths. If she lives for another 7000 days, she’ll never forget the smell. She closes her eyes and tries to remember how to breathe.

Toast stands up breathlessly, swiping at the blood and soot on her face. “I haven’t done anything like that since I was a kid,” she gasps as she pulls Furiosa up.

The Citadel is suddenly oppressively quiet, no more gunshots or engines revving down below, no more shouts from War Boys. The only sound is the high keening of a War Bay at the far end of the hall and the soft sound of flames as they snuff themselves out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many many heartfelt thanks to FrostbitePanda for beta-ing this for me. 
> 
> Updates should hopefully come a little quicker now. Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

Cheedo jumps up when Furiosa and Toast stumble into the Vault, leaving the bandages she was preparing behind. “You’re hurt!”  

“It’s just a scratch, I’ll be fine,” Furiosa says.

“That’s more than a scratch,” says Toast as she and Cheedo usher Furiosa to sit.

Cheedo looks sternly at Toast. “I was talking to both of you….oh.” Her eyes widen when she realizes the blood spattered on Toast isn’t seeping from injuries of her own. Furiosa, on the other hand, has her own blood oozing all down her right side from the shot that grazed her shoulder. She lets her focus wander while Cheedo talks to Toast in the background.

She can see Mara bandaging a bullet wound on one of the Milking Mothers off to the side, another breeder and a Pup helping Dag with poultices. A few more of the wounded are being tended to near the window. Cheedo sets to work cleaning away the blood and bandaging it; the wound is more than a scratch, but shallow enough that it doesn’t need stitches.

After it all, they got lucky. Yaga’s trap took out most of the remaining War Boys in the party. In return, they lost three of their own and a Pup, just barely old enough to be doing war. A handful of War Boys from the party remain outside the towers. Stranded there without water, they surrender when the lift is lowered. It had taken some debate between Toast and Capable and the other women, but eventually they decide to let the War Boys up, on the condition that they remain unarmed. 

In the next week more War Boys come filtering back, crammed into dented vehicles that escaped the pile-up. Some are injured and all of them are half-dead from thirst. They’re wary at first, all prepared to face Joe’s retribution for their failures. The news of Joe’s death leaves them gaping and listless, like bikes trapped in sand, kicking it up but moving nowhere. How does a god die? How can a god be killed?

Furiosa comes to meet them, once they’ve had their wounds tended to and have been given food and water.  She cuts a carefully constructed, imposing figure. They need the show of strength right now more than ever, need to make it clear that they can hold the Citadel in addition to having taken it. None of these boys were ever her crew, but their respect is palpable nonetheless.

Toast follows by her side, forging an impression of her own. Some of the Boys ask, “You’re the new Immortan?” and each time Toast can see Furiosa stiffen. She’s noticed the way that Furiosa’s eyes go flint-like at mention of the status Joe gave her. Toast has few illusions about what it means that Furiosa was an Imperator, let alone one as renowned as Joe’s infamous Bag of Nails. She remembers what it was like being brought to the Citadel. She remembers the brief glimpse of Furiosa’s closed off expression she caught as she was dragged through the garages. Furiosa’s eyes had been like chips of hard green glass before she looked away. 

They found Corpus in his rooms the day after the siege broke, still propped in his chair, cold and dead as a stone. The stray bullet that clipped his carotid artery was lodged in the wall behind him.  

The War Boys spit when they hear of his death. “Figures, the weakling son of the Immortan, dying soft.” His mate cuffs him upside the head in response, but the speaker turns to him, muttering, “What? You know it’s true. ‘s mediocre.”

“Not like he could fight.”

“Still. It’s shameful. He shoulda waited for a proper Witnessed death, ‘stead of slinking off like a lizard in the night.”  

* * *

 A lizard would have been more useful, thinks Toast later, as she and Cheedo dig through piles of Corpus’ books. She had thought that Joe would have guarded records as carefully as he did anything else of value. They’re only guarded so far as that the majority of them are hopelessly disorganized and written in a nearly illegible scrawl. Together, they’re able to pick out most of the information they need but it’s such a struggle that Toast half-wants to abandon the earliest logs as a lost cause.

In a stroke of luck, some of the Boys left behind are familiar enough with the supply runs to Gastown that even without ledgers, a few of them can say what would have been sent off when. Not exactly how much of it, but they have fair guesses.

It doesn’t matter so much though after all, because Gastown and the Bullet Farm have both been eerily silent. Furiosa is still running short a few cylinders; meanwhile Toast has been picking up slack, slowly become the primary link between the Boys and the former Wives. If a Pup had seen a flash from either of the distant cities, Toast would be the first to know. The silence is making everyone uneasy.

They have some bullets, and enough guzzoline to last for a little while, but not for long. A month maybe, perhaps a little more. Gastown had been due for a shipment of water and produce when Furiosa had gone off-road; by now they must scraping the bottom of the barrel. The water that runs in Gastown is barely more drinkable than their guzzoline; the surface of it shimmers in a myriad of colors like the sheen on a crow’s feather. Furiosa knows that they won’t have left a successor to chance. Someone else will already have been appointed to fill the People Eater’s place. She counts it among her few blessings that she hadn’t been required to meet with him often on her runs to Gastown; as an Imperator there had been no need for her to deal with numbers and politics. She was a soldier, a gun for the Immortan to aim and fire. She didn’t have the head or the stomach for the shallow pleasantries and cloaked threats that make up the fiber of the Gastown court.

The Bullet Farmers are kamikrazee war-mongers, but they need water and green as much as any other men. Unless they’ve found another source in their raids, they’ll run empty before long too. The pit of their city crouches just beyond the horizon, silent and impassive.

* * *

Furiosa hadn’t expected to see Max again, but she hasn’t spared herself time to think about him either. Summoning the energy to deal with even the bare necessities is a struggle. Still, she’s beginning to chafe under Capable and Cheedo’s care. She knows she’s being snappish and irritable but she hasn’t felt this weak in years. It’s so frustrating she could scream. Finally, the pain in her chest decreases, the pressure on each breath easing. The stab wounds have closed; the smaller one Max gave her soon after Mara took the tubing out.

Being more functional should be a relief, but it just means that she spends more time helping the others. It feels like everyone needs something from her. There are days at a time where she feels like she’s going to rattle out of her skin and wants nothing more than to get behind the wheel of the Rig, feel the road under her wheels, drive until the Citadel is a smudge on the horizon. But the Rig is a wreck under the pass and she’s back at the Citadel and the Green Place is gone and Valkyrie is gone and all but two of the Vuvalini are gone and Max is gone and it feels like the stone walls are going to press in on her and she can’t breathe—

She’s the last person they should be relying on. Angharad would have known what to do, she catches herself thinking once, and immediately stamps the thought down. If she looks back too long, she will sink as surely as the tyres of a rig into mud. Angharad isn’t there, and it’s partly Furiosa’s fault. She can’t do this, she can’t be the one that everyone looks at now to help them. But there isn’t another option, so if this is the path to redemption that she has to take now, well. She had never expected to feel redeemed anyway.

So she hasn’t thought about him. When Cheedo tears into the round room panting out, "Max is back!" a frisson of surprise runs through her.

A crowd has gathered when she arrives, striding towards the banged up car with long steps, her new arm glinting in the bright sunlight. Max is propped against the driver's side door and looks tired, dusty, and in need of a shave. His hair has grown out unevenly into messy tufts. But something unknots inside of her at seeing him again. She suddenly feels lighter than she has in weeks. Max looks up from tugging at the brace on his leg and gives her a small nod. She returns it and reaches out her hand to clasp his and pull him upright.

"Are you staying long?" she asks as they walk shoulder to shoulder up the stairs. "We'll get you water and food, and a bath if you want it."

* * *

 "It turns out Capable is something of a Blackthumb herself,” Furiosa says as they step over the doorway into the old Vault. The door has remained permanently open since the siege. "She has plans to change the flow of the water in the pools so that it's recycled over the plants—” Max hums, a small impressed sound, and looks around with wide eyes.

Max’s eyes dart overhead to the skylights, to the small doorway leading to the antechamber, then to the windows and behind him to the Vault door again. 

"You can leave your clothes by the edge of the pool and I’ll bring you new ones, if you like,” Furiosa says.

“Nnn,” says Max, shaking his head. “Don’t—" He waves a hand wave towards the door to punctuate the sentence.

“Leave? Ok…” says Furiosa, hesitance and confusion creeping into her voice, “I’ll stand outside the door. You can call for me when you’re done.”

Max nods and shrugs out of his jacket, dropping it to the floor where it lets out a puff of orange dust on contact. He drags his shirt over his head and drops it next to the jacket, then looks back up at Furiosa, waiting.  His skin is a patchwork of tan lines. The paler skin of his torso meets up with the dark bronze on his neck and the backs of his hands. He’s facing her so that she can’t see the brand on the back of his neck, or the tattoo that she knows must be on his back. He looks at Furiosa like he expects her to do something, she thinks, and she suddenly feels like she’s intruding, despite the clear evidence that he trusts her. She tilts her head towards the doorway. “I’ll be outside.”

Max watches her leave and stand with her back facing the Vault, guarding the doorway. He unhooks his leg brace and takes off his pants and boots, both letting out showers of dirt as he lowers them to the floor. With a groan he sinks into the water, warm from sitting under the skylight. Waves of red-orange dirt float off of his skin into the water. The dirt is a permanent fact of life, staining his skin and hair, a fine ever-present grit in the weave of his clothing. A respite from it is pure bliss. He takes a deep breath and plunges his head under the water, holding himself under the surface until his lungs start to burn. Underwater it’s weightless and quiet, only the muffled gurgle of the water through hidden pipes, nearly too soft to make out at all with his damaged ear. He can scarcely remember the last time he had the chance to float in water like this.

Max ducks under again, scrubbing at his hair and staining the water around him red-brown. A bowl and a razor have been left by the side of the pool. He shaves and rinses his face. Not a perfect job but worlds better than the thick scruff of beard he had been growing before. It’s novel to feel his own face again. He floats for a while after that, savoring the weightlessness on his leg. He’d stay here forever if he could, but eventually he hauls himself out. His feet make wet slapping sounds on the stone floor.

"Max?" Furiosa calls, "I have new clothes for you. Come to the door I'll hand them around." He reaches around the edge of the door and she places a bundle of trousers and a shirt in his hand, both worn and soft. He skims them on quickly and steps onto the frame of the door, balanced on the curved stone. His feet are still bare. He gathers up his brace and boots in one hand and the dirty clothes in the other. Then waits for her to lead the way.

* * *

They head off to the kitchen and Furiosa gets one of the Pups working there to give Max a plate of food. The pup scurries off  into the labyrinth of the kitchen after shyly handing a plate and spoon to Max. 

They wind their way back out of the depths of the tower and up a flight of stairs. When they reach the landing Furiosa pauses for a moment, breathing hard, her hand pressed to her side. Now that Max is looking, he can see the slight rise of bandages under the fabric of her shirt, tight around her ribcage. She pushes the grimace of pain off her face and turns to face Max, beckoning him down the wide hallway to a large door at the end. The room is large, organic in shape, with windows high up in the ceiling where light streams in. A large table sits in the middle of the room, looking like it had been carved out of the rock. At the far side of the room they sit next to each other on the low stools around it.

Max eats quickly at first, practically inhaling the food. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Furiosa trying to hide a grin, and he pauses then resumes eating again, slower this time, chewing each mouthful before swallowing. He saves the vegetables for last, a few narrow green beans and two bright red tomatoes no bigger than the first knuckle of his thumb that burst in his mouth, tart and sweet.

Furiosa waits until he has finished eating to talk to him. "You left.” She says it as a statement, but Max hears the accusation in it anyway. He had never given any promise to stay…but perhaps they had expected him to anyway, after it all.

"Was easier to go," he says, "Didn't want to, mmm, exactly, but staying's—hard. Didn't want to cause you trouble."

"So why'd you come back?" she asks.

The truth of it is purely practical: the Citadel has water, so he goes to the Citadel. The whole truth is something more, some part of it is buried and unknown, like a vehicle half covered by sand. You can see that there is something else there, hidden, but don’t know exactly what you’re dealing with until you unearth it. The whole truth of it is something that he doesn’t know himself. When the water and guzzoline had started to run low, he had turned his car to the west without a thought, like a compass needle swinging around. Like the iron in his blood was being drawn that way. Some things he doesn’t want to question too much. Some things are better not knowing the answer to.  He doesn’t have the words to answer this question. He has the shape of an answer, the feel of it, but not the describing. He would leave out some crucial part to try and explain it to her now.

It’s easier to give a non-answer, to shrug his shoulders in a way that could mean anything. He’s here now, so that’s the important part, right?

"How long are you staying?"

"Don't know yet," he says, "Maybe a while."

"Good," she says and a smile plays around her lips. “I’m sure we'll find something for you to do.”

* * *

 They run into the Dag and the younger one, Cheedo, he thinks, in the corridor. “I was wondering when you’d show up again, mad man,” the Dag says. Her hair is tied back with a dark cord and there are more braids and trinkets tied into it than when he saw her last. Dirt stains the knees of her trousers. The way she stares at Max is a little unnerving, assessing him, like she can see all the pieces that make him up written on his skin.

“I’ll return him, don’t worry,” she says, looking over Max’s shoulder to Furiosa. She circles one thin hand around his wrist and pulls him up a different branch of stairs. They’re heading up to the terraces at the top tower to show him what they've been working on. On the way up she keeps up a steady stream of chatter with Cheedo chiming in occasionally. They've started growing more plants from the seeds the Keeper gave her, she explains, and the first harvest will be ready in a few weeks. "There's aubergines and tomatoes and all kinds of beans now," she says.

"And we planted hemp too,” says Cheedo.

"It cleans the soil, makes it less sour,” says Dag.

They reach the top of the last stairwell as she finishes this thought and Max does a double-take. He hasn't seen this much green in years, discounting the glimpse he caught of the terraces in his mad dash to escape. “Our own Green Place,” says Dag, spreading her hands. Rows of plants spread out before him, some of them supported by fences of thin stakes, their vines twirling up and around the poles. Bushes with pointed star-like leaves lean heavy with fruit against the fences that surround them. Beneath the shelter of the stronger plants, small sprouts poke up from the soil. He spins, trying to take everything in. A windmill stands creaking and chugging softly near the edge of the terrace; he spots two more higher up. Here and there he can see workers bent between the shade of the trellises.  Behind him the Dag has started talking again, "... hydroponics down inside where there's already sprinkler pipes set up; they do better sheltered anyway..." He trails behind her and Cheedo, half listening as they lead him up the terraces, hand-in-hand.

They turn at the end of a row and gets his first look of her in profile. Her loose shirt stretches a little around the gentle curve of her stomach. He hadn't known she was pregnant. She catches him staring and smiles, runs her hand over her stomach. It’s a tight smile, sharp around the edges like the rest of her. “Yeah, got another little seedling here.... Keep said it could be a girl though.” Blessedly, she lets the grin drop and her face turns pensive. “Hope it is if it lives.”

Max doesn’t know what to say to that but she doesn’t expect an answer. She turns and beckons for him to keep following up to the top terrace.

* * *

They stay up in the gardens until the sun begins to set and everyone heads inside. Dag hunts down Furiosa poring over a book in the round room and gestures to Max. “Here’s your fool back, same as he left you.” He shoots her an affronted look, which she ignores completely.

“When was the last time you ate?” Cheedo asks Furiosa. 

“I’m fine. I’m not hungry.”

“See, I know by now that means it’s been far too long. Come with us. Please,” Cheedo begs. Furiosa acquiesces after it becomes clear that Cheedo isn’t really offering her a choice.

The four of them eat sitting at a long table with Toast and Capable. There’s a thin broth with greens and some kind of small round grain in it, and flatbread with bean paste. The noise of the hall makes Max twitchy, and it’s only increased when a wiry War Boy passing the table greets Capable with a shout and an exuberant wave. Max startles and tenses up but then he feels a brush against his leg. He glances down to see that Furiosa has placed her hand on top of his thigh under the table. It should bother him—he’s not a dog to be brought to heel—but the extra reminder of her presence is an unexpected balm. He’s hungry enough that he doesn’t really want to miss out on the opportunity just because his brain is staticking around again. Still, they take their leave soon after they’ve finished eating. She points out different landmarks as they pass, giving him the lay of the land. The rooms are getting progressively older and nicer as they walk. It’s clear they’re in personal quarters now, even though many of the rooms are open and empty.

"You can sleep in here," says Furiosa, "Cheedo and Dag are a few turns down the hallway. And my room is just upstairs..." The room is small but private, with a small window in the stucco wall that provides a little light from outside. There isn’t a proper bed, but a low step next to the wall with a pallet—the same as he had seen in other rooms they’d passed on the way—and a pile of blankets on top. Unlike most of the rooms, this one has a door. "...if you need me," she finishes. She takes her leave quietly, after an aborted hand motion—Max thought she had been reaching out to him but she snatched her hand back in an instant, the expression on her face unreadable.

With her gone, Max sleeps terribly, tossing and turning. When he finally falls asleep he has another nightmare; lashing dust storms, sand blocking his nose and mouth choking him, the ominous rumble of engines nearby, the bumper of a car glinting just outside of his vision as it roars closer to where he lies trapped under the sand, and a small voice shrieking just before—

_Why didn't you help Max, you promised to help us, you let us die! You let us die you let us die!_

He wakes with an aborted gasp, still fighting down his instinct to cry out in terror, his breath fast and catching in his throat. The chorus of his ghosts still rings in his ears. He gives up on sleep after that. He forces his breathing to slow then lies as still as he can in the nest of blankets. Once the sun creeps over the horizon, it feels safe enough to get up and wander the halls, try to learn the labyrinthine corridors in the quiet before the rest of the tower wakes up.  

**  
**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I'm very sorry for letting this much time pass since the last update; life really got away from me! Edits on this chapter also were making my tie my hair up in knots.  
> The good news is that the next two chapters are mostly written so, with some luck and a little editorial restraint on my part, they should be posted much sooner. This chapter is un-beta'ed so any mistakes are solely my fault!


	4. Chapter 4

It had been twenty-eight days since Max left the Citadel, slipped away quietly and repurposed a bike from one of the garages. He didn’t know how long he had been gone, really. Alone in the Wastes the days tend to blur together very quickly. He thought perhaps it had been longer. It makes sense then, the struggle that he quietly pretends not to notice in Furiosa. How she moves a little slower, pauses between flights of stairs. How sometimes he’ll look at her out of the corner of his eye and see her jaw clenched and face tight with pain, in the way that she doesn’t show when she knows someone is watching her. He had even walked into the round room one afternoon to find her fast asleep, propped up in a chair.

To stop his restless pacing, Max has been put to work in the garage fixing up vehicles. Capable often follows him down to the garages; she was the one to suggest the idea. The crew had been a little suspicious when he was introduced to the garage, despite Capable’s recommendation. “Oi, what’s this scav doing here? ‘m not having some wasteland fool messing around in my shop,” Gasket had complained. But they soon fell back into their usual work flow, content to move around him.

Max half-listens as they talk amongst themselves, keeping up a steady stream of gossip. Other times, once he’s engrossed in a project, the conversation fades into a comfortable hum in the background. He had gotten only a taste of their chattiness before in Organic’s quarters, muted between tired untalkative boys and Max’s own woozy distraction from blood loss; this was the first time he was getting the full force of their chatter.

“How’s a bloodbag know all this shine stuff you do about fixin’ up cars anyhow?” asks Fetcher one day while Max is waist-deep in the hood of a busted up pursuit vehicle. Max twitches badly and almost gouges his head on the sharp edge of the engine compartment.

“’m a driver,” he grunts from inside the engine compartment, “not a bloodbag.”

“Oh? I thought you was a bloodbag. Before.”

Max lifts his head out from inside the car to glower at Fetcher. “ _Was_. Before that was a driver.”

Fetcher is young, barely earned his grease before Furiosa had gone rogue, and he looks chastised at that, scuffing his boot through the dust of the garage floor. “Didn’t mean nothing by it.”

Max huffs and hides his head back into the engine compartment. He can feel Fetcher stay behind him though, craning to look over Max’s shoulders at his work. The boys still make Max uneasy, even the young ones, but he doesn’t so much mind them watching him work from a distance. They’re eager to please; often at least one jumps up to show him around the garage, or point out where to find tools and parts that he might need. The ones that were stand-offish at first treat him as he does them. He remembers someone saying a long time ago _“They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”_ He thinks maybe that works here too, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

* * *

Now that Max has a task, he spends most of his time down in the garages. Working on the engines keeps his hands busy, gives him something to focus on that is achievable and concrete. When he’s working it’s like there is something blocking out the voices of the dead. They bubble up through the cracks when he is alone and left to his own devices. It’s not perfect: sometimes the garage gets to be too much, suddenly too loud with the voices of Repair Boys chattering to each other, the burnt rubber smell of tyres and oil and chalk choking him, and he feels like he’s about to rattle out of his skin.

Once, a War Boy jumps down from the top of a truck so that his feet smack loudly on the ground next to the car that Max is working under. He startles so badly that the creeper half scoots from under him and he scrapes a gash into his hand on an edge of pipe. Once, one of the War Boys comes back from test driving one of the new vehicles, screeching into the shop with a roar of the engine and a wordless shout, and Max doesn’t think, just bolts and comes back to himself on a stair landing a few levels up, his breath echoing in his ears in fast pants. Toast is standing in front him looking concerned. Max doesn’t understand until he sees her speak again, her mouth move soundlessly around the shapes. _Max? Where are you?_

He doesn’t have the words to answer her; lost somewhere under the white roar in his ears, so he just shakes his head and moves his hands without thinking, old shapes. _I’m here—_

She frowns for a moment and then her mouth opens in an oh of surprise. She raises her hand slowly to eye level. Concentration showing on her face, she points her first two fingers and moves them away from her. _Look at me._ Her thumb and forefinger pinch together and then she drags her pointed finger down over her chest, places her right hand over her upturned left before raising and lowering them. _Can I help?_ Her movements are halting but she’s giving Max something to focus on. _Breathe._ “Count them,” she says, “come on, in and out.” Max focuses on his breathing: in _one_ , out _two_ , in _three_ , out _four_...

* * *

 Often he retreats to the pump room or the hydroponics bay, lets the rush of the water wash out the panic. Most days he finds Furiosa in the halls, falls in step next to her until they make their own ways off to wherever they are needed. It would have been easy for him to hide away, slip out of her sight and do his best not to put down roots, but some part of him says that she’s the _reason_ he came back, a wordless litany in the shape of _Furiosa Furiosa Furiosa_. Without discussing it, they somehow gravitate towards each other.

They share dinner together most evenings. She’ll dodge her way through the throngs of people in the kitchens, come back with two plates of food, and they’ll find a quiet corner to sit in.

"Why did you come back?" she asks. They’re sitting on one of the open balconies letting the cool dusk air wash over them. Her voice is low and quiet.

She knows about his voices he’s sure, but talking about them seems private, final. _Thought maybe I could use your help_ , he thinks. _Thought maybe the ghosts would fade away again around other people._ But that’s not really the truth. He wouldn’t do that to her if he could help it. He doesn’t want to add extra weight to her load, doesn’t want to bleed on her. He wanted to be useful. He wanted to want to stay this time, for the first time in a long time, and he hadn’t been able to make himself. The best he had been able to do was to make himself come back, after the voices in his head stopped shrieking for him to run. He wanted to know that she still lived and breathed. He wanted to know that his blood still flowed in her veins, that for once he had helped to do something good. He wanted to follow her for reasons he doesn’t even know. He doesn’t have the slightest idea of how to say this. If he tries to speak now, to explain, the words will tangle up in the unreliable space between his mind and his mouth.

Rather than answer, he makes a noncommittal noise and shrugs his shoulders.

She looks at him, her glass-green eyes piercing. He knows she can hear the omission. He’s thankful when she doesn’t press the matter. Just leans over and rests her shoulder against his, warm pressure all down his side.

* * *

Toast is sitting at the far side of the round table when Max walks in, a wide book open on the table in front of her. Her head is leaned in towards the page and her hands are propped up on the table in front of her. It takes Max a long moment to realise that her hands are moving neither aimlessly nor in the variations of triangles for V8, as strange as that would be for her. She's spelling. He stares for a moment, remembering the shapes he hasn't seen in years and years.

He crosses the room and sits down to her left, scooting the chair away to give her a little more space. He props his wrists up on the table, leaving his hands in her peripheral vision before he moves them: index finger pointing up at his palm, ring finger angled out, pointing at the thumb making a L, crossed pinkies, palm open again. _Hi T-O-A-S-T._ She looks over at him and smiles.

“The other day…” Max starts, then pauses, humming uncomfortably. “I…didn’t say.”

Toast stops him. “Don’t mention it. Really. It’s fine.” Max looks relieved. “How can you can sign?” she asks.

He doesn’t say anything for a long time and she stares at him hard, purses her lips. You brought it up, mad man.

He keeps getting himself tangled into these contracts on accident; every time he comes around he finds some other fine print carved at the foot of his name here. Finally he says, “There was...a woman. Before.” So long ago that he forgets it, sometimes.

“You? Mmmm...doesn’t seem like something you pick up in the Wastes…exactly.” He huffs out the ghost of a laugh at the end, almost on accident. A long forgotten conversation marker.

“You’d be surprised. I learned a few signs though, from someone that passed through my tribe once. Didn’t think I’d actually use them again.”

That seems right; that fits with what he knows of her. Toast, that asks questions that others won’t, just for the sake of knowing the answers. “Then I ended up here, and lucky us, what’s there a book on? I wonder if Joe even looked or if he just didn’t realise.” She scoffs. “I figured out enough to talk to Dag from across the room but none of the others picked it up before we left. Dag and Cheedo wouldn’t even need it though; it’s like they’re connected at the brain.”

He hums in agreement. Pointing at the book in front of her, he says, “Joe had that? From before?”

“Yeah, he’d hoard everything valuable. I’m sure he never read most of the books he kept. They used to be all in the Vault with us. He wanted us to be educated.” Her usually serious face darkens another shade into a scowl. “Perfect in every way.”

Max doesn’t know what to say to that. Offering comfort to another human being is a skill and he is long out of practice. It comes back in pieces, slowly, instinctual. Easier to grasp someone’s hand or let them lean on you than to offer platitudes. Speaking doesn’t always come so easily anyway. Sometimes the words get lost between his brain and his mouth.

 _But I’m glad you can_ , Max signs and Toast smiles in reply, a little proudly.

“I don’t know very much yet, only some of what’s in this book. And it’s a beginner’s book.” She frowns. “Could you teach me some?”

There it is, the hook she tries to sink in again. What’s the harm he thinks, except there is, there always is —but he could to stick around for a little while longer maybe. “Don’t see why not,” Max finally allows.

Toast grins triumphantly and gathers up her book. “I have to take this watch. I’ll see you later.” She pauses at the door and turns back to him. “Thanks. And really, the signing? Don’t mention it.”

At that she sweeps out of the room, leaving Max somehow feeling like he just completed a barter where he wasn’t quite sure what he had come away with.

* * *

In the middle of the night Max finds himself standing outside of Furiosa's room. He had woken from another nightmare with his heart racing, sleep failing him again. He still lay trying, even as whispers and fragments of thought skirted around the edge of consciousness until they became impossible to ignore. His mind raced along the same dark snarl of thoughts, over and over. He hadn’t thought of where he was going when he left the room she had given him, too focused instead on the claustrophobic press of the walls and the frustrating bone-deep feeling that he had to move. His feet took the familiar path to outside Furiosa’s door of their own accord and left him there with the beginnings of a different panic growing at the root of his brain.

Before he can make up his mind, the door opens of its own accord. "I heard you outside," says Furiosa. "You can come in. If you want." Max feels a swell of embarrassment among the panic. He shouldn't be here, he shouldn't be encroaching—

"It's ok. I wasn't sleeping either." She steps aside to let him into the room. With the door closed there is a sense of finality, of a decision made that now cannot be undone. Somehow that calms him, ratchets his panic and embarrassment back down. Her room is lit by an old style lamp on the side table, all in plastic, even the shade. The dull light it casts around the room leaves dark corners and dark lines on her face. He is reminded suddenly of the first time he saw her, Imperators' black smudged across her eyes and forehead. But now, instead of his instincts screaming for him to flee, now he wants, something unnamable and foreign that unfurls in his gut, and that is far more frightening.

She gestures to the single bed, settles down on it and curls up on her side while she waits for him to catch up to speed. He gets in carefully beside her and tries to keep a safe distance between them, so cautious not to take anything more than offered. She huffs in exasperation and curls around him: her ankles brushing his, her knees tucked in behind his, her wrist resting on his hip. "Bed's not that big, it's ok. Sleep."

Her trust in him is unexpected, inexplicable, but her closeness is such a comfort. He slips easily into unconsciousness, lulled to sleep by the sound of her breath.

He finds he sleeps better with her in the room. Whether or not they touch, he’s exactly aware of how close they are; he doesn’t need it for proof that she’s there. But the contact is good, even better than the knowledge that he can rest a little safer with her there to watch his back.

Sometimes he sleeps in a nest across from her bed. The second night, he came awake flailing from another nightmare and she had whaled him across the face. He had moved to a mattress on the floor after that. The bed isn't really big enough for two people anyway. On calmer, good nights, that’s when he chances moving back to her again. He knows she wouldn’t allow it if it were only for his benefit.

She has her fair share of thrashing nightmares, he learns.  She’ll wake in a haze of rage, shouting and lashing out. He wakes on the defensive, in flight-mode, tensed to ward off an attack. One time she comes up reaching for the gun under her bed. before she realises where she is. Max shakes her awake with her hand still clenched around the gun. His own rests to the side of the barrel, pushing it away from his face.. She freezes, as he gently uncurls her fingers from around the handle and sets the gun aside.

She curls into herself, away from him, making herself smaller, trying to minimize the damage. He figures they’re even and stops counting, after enough nights where Max’s twitching wakes Furiosa, his foot jammed in her side, or catches his elbow on her jaw; where her arm strikes hard across his sternum, bone against bone. They never hit hard enough to do any serious damage but leave each other with trails of tiny bruises, puzzle pieces to match up.

Furiosa is light sleeper from years of having to come awake in an instant, ready to kill or be killed. It hasn’t left her. Maybe it never will. They’re not good for each other, he thinks as he lays next to her on the mattress, but they’ve gravitated together regardless. He isn’t sure what to do about that.

It should have been easy to wrench himself away from her and the Citadel and the girls, just like it has been all the times before, but it’s unexpectedly difficult. It’s not going to get any easier either, he’s sure of that now. He’ll just have to grit his teeth and do it, like pulling out an arrow. It might hurt nearly the same; his mind keeps shying away, skittering around and trying to gather up the momentum. Already he can feel himself putting down roots, weak spindly ones, but there nonetheless. He doesn’t mean to but apart from tearing himself away and running again he can’t figure out how to stop. Leaving would be for the best. If he stays here eventually something terrible will happen again.

He heaves a sigh and rolls over, narrowing the distance between their backs to centimeters until he can feel the heat radiating from her. She grumbles something half-asleep and scoots backwards towards him, closing the gap between their spines. She hooks her ankle over his then falls still, comfortable again. He lays there, feeling the steady rise and fall of her ribcage against his back and stares into the dark, hoping to make the moment last.

* * *

All through the first weeks that Max had been back, Furiosa kept expecting to wake one morning and find him gone. Seven days slip by into fourteen, then twenty-one, and still Max stays. It feels like she’s holding her breath, waiting for something to happen. Sooner or later, some straw will land wrong on top of everything else he already carries and he’ll bolt. The fact that she expects it doesn’t make it hurt any less. It might even make it harder, she thinks. On the twenty-fifth day, the mirrors of Gastown glint on the horizon.


	5. Chapter 5

_Water for guzzoline_ the mirrors spell out.  Citadel sends back a message immediately. _When_?

_Tomorrow_ comes the reply.

They do need the fuel, desperately at this point. They’ve been rationing, only using what was absolutely necessary to power the generators and the pumps. Salvage runs and raids have been mostly suspended, as short as they are on fuel and crew. They’re lucky that they still have one small run down rig in the garages that can make the run. It hasn’t been used regularly in eons but it stills runs, albeit a little slower and clankier than the War Rig.

“Is it really smart to just drive into Gastown like this?” asks Capable. A group of them are clustered around the end of the table in the round room. It’s hardly an official council. It’s the best they can manage right now.

“We don’t have any idea of what sort of state they’re in,” says Janey, “You don’t know who’s in control there now or what their plans are.”

“We don’t have much of a choice,” says Furiosa, “We need the guzz, they need water. It’s been over 60 days since their last delivery. They’ve got to be parched by now. That means they’ll be more willing to deal fair. They have as much to lose from this going south as we do.”

“Do we know who might have stepped up after the People Eater?” asks a Milking Mother. Furiosa thinks she recognizes her from the siege, but she has no name to match to the face.

“No, but things won’t have changed much. They’ve got thousands of people, and the People Eater kept a tight hand on his generals. Whoever stepped into his place won’t have upset anything drastically. At least not until they go over his books.”

“I don’t trust them,” says Janey flatly.

“I don’t either,” says Yaga from where she’s squeezed in between a Repair Boy and a former breeder, “but Furiosa has a point. They’re the least likely to try anything right now; we should take advantage of them coming to us first and try for some leverage.”

“The old rig used to haul three thousand gallons of water and another thousand of milk, plus produce. If we’re going to be trying to feed everyone…”

Capable makes an alarmed noise off to her left and starts, “ _Of course_ we’re going to—”

“...then we can’t afford the luxury of trading any green right now. The rig we have left is _maybe_ half as big. If we’re lucky and they’re desperate enough, they’ll take whatever we offer.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” asks Janey.

If they’re not lucky, then everything gets shot to hell. She doesn’t need to explain to them how delicate the balance of trade between the three factions is. If Gastown decides not to take Citadel’s offer, then Citadel is effectively grounded. It’s as close to a death sentence as they could get. They need to hold on to as many allies as they can, and they can’t afford to show weakness right now.  “Then we improvise.”

She’s glad that Max isn’t here to watch this. She’s sure that he’d see through her bluff in an instant, in the same uncanny way that he seems to be able to predict her movements. She doesn’t want to drag him into this. It’s not fair to him, she thinks, when what he wants so clearly is to be away from them  and back on the road. She doesn’t understand what has kept him from running already, but she’s selfishly grateful for whatever it is. Max is an unexpected comfort; something that has been a rarity for thousands of days. Something she can’t pass up, try as she might.

A small part of her worries that she’s going soft, a voice in the back of her head that sounds uncomfortably like Joe. She’s been doing her best to push that voice down, even when it rears its head in the quiet moments where they lie curled around one another in bed in cool of the morning. Or when she catches herself reaching out to smooth down the tuft of hair on Max’s head that never lies flat.

She continues, “..we’ll take a full convoy with us, as much as we can manage, show them that we’re not easy pickings. We’ll go quick—in and out. It’ll give us the chance to get the lay of the land and we’ll be able to draw up a better plan for the next run.”

“We can do it,” Hazard pipes up suddenly. “We aren’t the fabled Rig crew but we’re resilient. We can fight.”

“And Hazard can drive like something else,” says Hazard’s lancer Xeno, seated to his right. A flush springs across Hazard’s tanned cheeks and over his sharp nose, barely visible beneath the thin dusting of chalk. “We’ll make a good crew. We can handle what they throw at us.”

They arrive at an agreement. A rig filled with water to be delivered the next day, in exchange for fuel. A small crew for the rig, and one vehicle to accompany it.

* * *

 Max had deliberately stayed away from the council meeting that afternoon. He doesn’t have anything to add, this time. He has been to Gastown, of course, but he doesn’t know it like others here do. And still he doesn’t want to become any more entangled than he already is, if he can help it.

But he’s restless while the meeting is happening. He passes through the halls, stopping by Mara’s workshop to borrow some salve and a bandage for the burn he seared on the back of his hand from a still-hot engine earlier in the week. He loops through one of the pump rooms in the middle of the tower where Fetcher is working on a new motor for part of the system, and through the upper halls where he is greeted by two former breeders as he passes them, ones that he now recognizes from the gardens. He skirts the hydroponics room and the small garden ledges whose drainage grates look down into tunnels that are uncomfortably familiar.  

When he finds himself on the stairwell leading to the round room again he’s timed it correctly; the meeting has just finished. Conversation floats through the open door and out into the hallway. Furiosa is the first out of the room, the back of her head receding quickly down the stairs away from him. He takes two steps at a time to fall in step beside her.

“When do we leave?” he asks.

“You’re coming with us? How did you know what they would decide?” She sounds surprised.

“Mmm, _you_ already decided. ’s the best plan. Made sense they’d agree eventually.”

She gently grabs his elbow and peels off into one of the alcoves lining the hallway, dragging him with her. She stands with her back to the open air outside the ledge. The metal of her arm and the down of her growing-out hair glow, limned with light from outside. “You’re sure you want to come? We don’t know what we’re headed into.” She hasn’t looked away since she heard him behind her. Her eyes on him are somber and steely.

“Never do,” he says pragmatically. “I can be useful there. Know a bit of Gastown. And it’s not like you have much extra crew.” His tone is serious, but his eyes crinkle ever so slightly at the edges. His voice has the melodic rumble it does when he’s not struggling with his words.

“Why are you still here? …I can tell you don’t want to, a lot of the time…” she says.

“ ‘m useful here. Trying to fix what’s broken…it’s something I can do to help a bit.” He hasn’t shrugged off her hand yet, even though his voice has gone stilted, even though now he can’t seem to meet her gaze. “Don’t _want_ to leave either, you know.”

“Thank you, Max,” she says. Her voice turns hushed and ragged; if she weren’t standing so close to him he might not have heard her at all. Her grip on the elbow of his jacket tightens, drawing him closer into her space until she can very carefully lean her head down and forward and rest it against his. He sighs into the touch and gingerly places his hand over the base of her skull, cupping the back of her head in one large warm palm.

“I can’t promise…” he says quietly.

“—I know.”

“…but I’m trying.”

* * *

 When she reaches her room that night Max is already there, laying out blankets on the pallet. She sits down on the edge of her bed to unbuckle the belts of her prosthetic, letting it fall with a soft thump to the mattress. “You don’t have to move...just because of the run, you know,” she says. Still careful not to press too hard, to upset the careful balance between them.

Max shakes his head and mumbles, “…’s best for tonight. Not going to, mmmm, mess up like that.”

“Fool,” she grumbles, “you know that isn’t true.” She hooks a finger into the collar of his shirt and gently pulls him up. He follows, his forehead wrinkled with surprise and relief, and sinks down onto the bed with a contented sigh. She is struck again by a sudden, inexplicable urge to run her hand over the ragged fringe of his hair.

Instead, she settles down onto the bed. He burrows into the blankets, towards the warm middle of the bed, and presses their backs together.

“Goodnight Max,” she says softly.

“G’night Furiosa,” he replies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is un-beta’ed, all mistakes are my fault alone. 
> 
> The end of the semester is just around the corner for me which means I don’t expect to have much free time. It will probably be another two weeks before the next update, my apologies.  
> Also, if anyone would be interested in beta-ing for me I would love to hear from you!
> 
> I can be found at tumblr [here](http://weirywolf.tumblr.com). Thank you for reading!


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